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Seventeenth of October. Marrow, V., age unknown. Inside the Ring. Taken by the three houses together. Survived. Further action:

(Left this one blank. I'm coming back for it. — K.)

Two weeks after the Ring, Mrs. Dunning said the word "wolf" out loud in the Cumberland Farms.

I need you to understand how big this was. This is a woman with a forearm that looks like a subway map. For twenty-six years she'd told people she "had a run-in with some wire." And on a Tuesday, in line for coffee behind me and Juniper, she looked at the scar on my palm, then at the trees across Route 11, and said, to nobody, at a normal volume, "It was a wolf. Big gray one. I saw its eyes."

The guy at the register dropped a lottery ticket. Somebody's kid said, "Cool." That was it. The roof didn't fall in.

"She's going to be insufferable now," Juniper whispered, thrilled. "She's going to tell everyone at bingo."

"Good," I said. "Let her."

It kept happening after that. Not a flood, more like a leak in a ceiling you've ignored too long. Mr. Carver told his physical therapist "lynx" and didn't add so-called. Old Pruitt from the library left a typed list on the town hall bulletin board with forty-one names on it, everyone she knew who'd ever "declined to say," and under it in pen, Say it. Someone tore it down. Someone else put it back up. By Friday there were three copies.

I'm not going to pretend I did that. I'm going to pretend I did a little of it.

The family meeting happened at the kitchen table, which in the Harrow house means all eight of us fighting for six chairs and Bea sitting on the counter like a cat on a radiator.

Dad had a folder. Of course he did. He'd printed out Zillow listings for Brooklyn, two apartments in Park Slope and one in Queens that was, frankly, a crime scene with granite countertops.

"The Accord holds now," he said. He didn't look at me when he said it, which is how I knew how hard it was to say. "It doesn't need me here. It doesn't need any of us here. If you want to go home, we go home. I mean it this time."

Mom put her hand flat on the folder. Just rested it there. She hadn't totally forgiven him. You could see it in how she'd been setting his coffee down a couple inches out of reach all week. But she'd stopped sleeping in Lucy's room, so.

"Vote," she said.

Max and Mia looked at each other, did their creepy twin eyebrow thing, and Mia said, "We want to stay. Sela's mom's teaching us to track."

"You're grounded until college," I reminded them.

"Tracking is educational," Max said.

Owen didn't look up from his Switch. "The Wi-Fi here is terrible," he said. Then, after a long pause: "Caspian said he'd show me how the ravens do the map thing. From up high. Like a real-life minimap." He pressed a button very hard. "Stay."

Lucy had the Register's 1825 entries copied into a composition notebook in color-coded pen, because Lucy is ten and terrifying. "There are four hundred years of Harrow names I haven't cross-referenced," she said. "I can't leave mid-project."

Bea swung her feet against the cabinet. "Elias's kitty lives here," she said, like that closed the case, and honestly it kind of did.

Everybody looked at me.

I had my I ♥ NY hoodie on. I'd had it on through a forest, a party, a stone circle trying to eat my soul, and approximately nine hundred washes. The cuffs were basically lace now.

"I already chose," I said, and held up my palm. "Out loud. In front of a lot of rocks. But for the record, we visit the city at Christmas, Dad pays for Joe's Pizza every single time, and I'm keeping the hoodie."

Dad laughed. A real one, surprised out of him, the kind I hadn't heard since we crossed the county line. He put his scarred hand over mine on the table. His was cool now. Mine wasn't.

Mom slid his coffee back within reach.

So, the boys.

I'm going to tell you this part fast because if I slow down I'll start editorializing, and you'll know.

Caspian went first, because Caspian always goes first. He showed up on our porch railing Wednesday morning as a raven, which he thinks is charming and I think is a privacy violation. Then he was a boy in a black coat sitting on the railing instead, eating one of Mom's muffins he definitely hadn't been offered.

"I've been watching you for two months," he said.

"Yeah, that's the problem, babe."

"I'm saying I'd like to keep doing it." He tilted his head the bird way. "Openly. Dinner. There's a place in Bangor with real tablecloths."

"Bangor," I said, "is not a flex."

He grinned with the cut still healing through his eyebrow and left a black feather on the railing, tip pointed at my window. Theatrical. I put it in my desk drawer. Shut up.

Elias didn't ask. Elias never asks. I found him Thursday at dusk at the edge of our yard, where the lawn quits and the Greywood starts. He was sitting with Bea, teaching her to be still. Half the lynxes had come down from the ridge to see him, the way you'd line up to see the new boss. He looked like he hadn't slept since he'd put his knee on his uncle's chest.

"They keep asking what I want," he said, when Bea went inside. "I don't know yet." He looked at my hand. He didn't take it. He didn't need to. Somehow the not-touching was worse. "I know I want you to be there when I figure it out."

Then he was gone into the trees without a sound, and I stood in the dark for a full minute with my pulse doing the Q train thing.

Ronan was last, because Ronan waits. Friday night, the logging road, mile four. I'd started running it again. Neon Hokas and everything, which he looked at like they'd personally insulted his ancestors.

"I told you not to run in these woods," he said.

"And yet."

He fell in beside me and we ran the last stretch together, and when I stopped, gasping, he didn't. Not right away. He came back around and stood in front of me, close, the cold coming off the pines and the heat coming off him. He took my wrist the way he had in the Ring, thumb over the pulse, like he was checking I was real.

"Pick," he said quietly. "I know they've asked. I'm asking too."

The thing is, he meant it. They all meant it. Three boys who'd spent a thousand years of family history wanting to tear each other's throats out had knelt in the same dirt for me. Now each of them, separately, politely, in his own weird species-specific love language, was trying to collect.

I pulled my wrist back. Gently, but I pulled it.

"I didn't save three kingdoms to be a prize," I said.

His jaw did something. Then — and I'll take this to my grave — he smiled, slow, like I'd landed a punch he'd been hoping for.

"Then I'll keep running," he said, and left me at mile four with my heart going like a car alarm on Lexington.

Halloween, I finally got my pen.

Dad drove me out to the Ring at sundown. He waited at the treeline, which was smart, because I'd told him if he followed me in I'd tell Mom about the folder he still kept under the seat. The stones were quiet now. Moss on the north sides. Frost starting in the grass. Somewhere off in the dark something large shifted its weight, and for once it didn't make me want to throw up. It made me want to say hi.

I opened the Register on the center stone. A thousand years of flat, careful handwriting. No further action. No further action. No further action. I turned to the Varek page and filled in the blank.

Further action: held by the three houses, under watch, by order of the Harrow.

Then I turned to a fresh page. My hand shook a little. I'm choosing to blame the cold.

Thirty-first of October. Harrow, K., age 18. Right palm. Inside the Ring. Chose to stay. Survived. Further action: everyone in this village says what they saw, out loud, from now on. Witnessed:

And I'd planned it. I had. They came out of the trees one at a time and signed. Ronan wrote in heavy block letters. Caspian signed with a flourish so dramatic it took up two lines. Elias wrote small and exact, and his hand brushed mine when he handed back the pen, and nobody said anything about that, and nobody needed to.

Three names. I blew on the ink like an idiot.

When I looked down again there was a fourth.

It sat under Elias's, in ink that was still wet and not mine, in a slanting hand I'd never seen in a thousand years of pages. No surname. No house. Just a mark like a hook with a line through it, and one word written beside it, in the Register's own flat voice:

Noted.

The trees had gone completely silent. Ronan's hand closed on my wrist. Caspian was already looking up. Elias was looking at the water-black edge of the forest, where none of their people stood.

I clicked the pen. My palm was burning white.

"Okay," I said. "Who invited you?"